Columnist Ron Kantowski: Lying not the ticket in sports

Monday, July 24, 2000 | 10:28 a.m.

Ron Kantowski's column usually appears Thursday. Reach him at ron@lasvegassun.com or 259-4088. Regular columnist Dean Juipe has the day off.

Nothing can turn a never-was into a has-been the way sports and about 10 years can.

During the recent XFL news conference at Sam Boyd Stadium, I was the third man in during a conversation between a colleague and a 6-foot-7, 330-pound behemoth who looked like he could bench press a Buick Electra.

He said he had played some college ball in Michigan -- Central Michigan to be exact -- and given that I had left my CMS media guide back at the office and the big guy had just squished a fly in the folds of his neck, there was no reason to doubt him. I figured he was just there to hit up Vince McMahon for a job.

Trying to make small -- er, large -- talk, we asked the big fella who his coach was at Central. He hemmed and hawed and finally said that Central had so many coaches during those days that he couldn't remember.

I gracefully bowed out of the conversation before my loafers got soiled with that National Finals Rodeo by-product.

Maybe the guy took one too many slaps to the helmet and had indeed contracted amnesia. But if I had to guess, he was just trying to impress a couple of local sportswriters with a bogus athlete's feat.

He certainly won't be last to let the passage of time pad his statistics.

Sometimes, embellishing one's playing career tempts even those whose current achievement surpasses what didn't happen in the past. Several years ago, when then-UNLV football coach Jeff Horton charged a Sun columnist wasn't qualified to critique his team because said columnist "never played the game," a check of Horton's record showed he never played the game, either -- at least not at Arkansas, which his media guide bio claimed.

Jeff Horton is a gentleman who never came across as boastful. As far as I know, he rarely -- if ever -- talked about playing football at Arkansas. Yet had he just taken the time to clear up that tiny bit of misinformation, he would have been spared the embarrassment of having to explain it some 20 years later.

Which brings us to the sad case of former Toronto Blue Jays manager Tim Johnson.

Johnson didn't have to blow smoke about playing ball, because he did it for seven years in the major leagues. But he told a more grievous lie -- in an effort to motivate his players, he told them he had fought in Vietnam when the only action he saw was with Marine reserves in California.

Despite showing promise as a manager, Johnson did not survive the controversy and was fired prior to the 1999 season. Exiled to the Mexican League, he apologizes profusely and with sincerity -- for about the umpteeth time -- on a segment for HBO's "Real Sports" which airs at 10 tonight.

I have to confess that I felt sorry for Johnson, especially given that virtually every long-ball threat who has snorted cocaine, been slapped with a restraining order or head-butted an umpire still has his place in the lineup.

But then, I admit I never smelled napalm in the morning.

In this case, it was society -- not baseball -- that suspended Tim Johnson. And there's no appealing the decision.